‘For the first time ever, a university is forced out of an EU member state.’
Photograph: Daniel Kasap/EPA

“CEU has been forced out.” That is how Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian president of Central European University (CEU), announced the end of his university’s more than 25 years of operation in Budapest, Hungary. And 20 years after I started my first academic job at this unique university, CEU will no longer be part of Hungarian higher education, moving its operation to Vienna instead. For the first time ever, a university is forced out of an EU member state. Hungary hereby joins a growing group of authoritarian countries that (for all purposes) shut down independent universities, including Belarus (European Humanities University), Russia (European University at St Petersburg) and Turkey (multiple universities).

CEU was founded in 1991 by US-Hungarian philanthropist George Soros, largely to educate the new elites of post-communist Europe in the spirit of “open societies” of Karl Popper, who influenced Soros profoundly when he was a student at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). It soon established itself as a uniquely international, world-class university which attracted talented faculty and graduate students from across Europe and the world. My classes at CEU never had more than 20% students from the same country – mainly Hungary – which was an invaluable resource for courses on international politics in general, and nationalism in particular.

Tensions between CEU and the Hungarian rightwing date back decades, notably to the first government of Viktor Orbán in 1998-2002, and are therefore not purely a reflection of the increasing power of radical right politics today. But the fact that Orbán was not only able to frustrate CEU at the turn of the century, but could force them out of Hungary in 2018, is indicative of the populist radical right zeitgeist of what Americans like to call the Trump era.

At the national level, it shows that far from being moderated by EU incorporation, Orbán is continuing to radicalize and to take his project to transform Hungary from a liberal democracy into an “illiberal state” further and further. Emboldened by another engineered constitutional majority earlier this year, and an increasingly favorable international environment, Orbán has opened a full-throttle onslaught on the last vestiges of independent civil society in the country, from academia to NGOs, putting cultural institutions and media under ever tighter party control. As the last democratic facades are slipping, Orbán’s authoritarian rule is starting to show more and more totalitarian features.

That all of this happens at the heart of the EU, is perhaps the most shocking aspect of all. After all, the process of European integration is a direct response to the horrors of fascism. The EU was founded to ensure that Europe would “never again” fall victim to radical right rule. This is why many Orbán critics expected the EU to step in and protect liberal democracy – rather than continue to heavily subsidize his authoritarian, kleptocratic government.

For years we reached out to the European People’s party (EPP), the mainstream-right political group of which Orbán’s Fidesz party is a member, but to no avail. What we failed to understand, is that most EPP members have long given up on the liberal democratic consensus of the postwar era, in which far-right parties and policies are considered unacceptable. Many EPP member parties have entered national coalitions with radical right parties (eg in Austria, Denmark and Italy) or have adopted radical right rhetoric and implemented radical right policies to fight off electoral challenges (eg in France and the Netherlands). In short, the EPP is today much more the party of Viktor Orbán than of Angela Merkel, as the choice of Orbán supporter Manfred Weber (over Alex Stubb) as spitzenkandidat for 2019 once again confirmed.

Finally, the CEU affair shows the chilling effects of Trump’s amoral and egocentric America First politics. Two years ago it would have been completely unthinkable that the US would accept the closure of a US institution by another government. In fact, the main reason that Orbán was one of the first international leaders to come out in support of Republican candidate Trump was his deep resentment toward Hillary Clinton, who, as secretary of state, had been the most effective and vocal critic of his authoritarian policies.

As most people in the world, including in the US, Orbán initially overestimated the power of the US president. Hence, he was taken aback by US critique of his higher education bill (nicknamed LexCEU because it specifically targeted CEU), and fired his US ambassador, who had failed to gain access to Trump. Slowly but steadily Orbán figured out that although “America First” does not necessarily mean support for other radical right leaders, it does mean that the US no longer objects to their authoritarian policies either. As long as you don’t openly oppose Trump, you are free to do whatever you want in your own country. Trump doesn’t care and the US Congress is too obsessed with the various major and minor Trump scandals to engage with the rest of the world (except for some rightwing hobbyhorses, like Iran, Israel and Venezuela).

This is a terrifying reality in a world that is increasingly governed by authoritarian leaders. Three of the largest democracies are now run by far-right leaders (Brazil, India and US), while two of the largest non-democracies have taken a decisively more authoritarian turn (eg China and Russia). In the EU and the US the mainstream right is increasingly normalizing the radical right, preferring collaboration over opposition, while the mainstream left is too weak or too obsessed with national survival to fight back. If this will not change soon, CEU’s fate will be shared by many more civil society organizations around the world, including in alleged democracies.